Albert Einstein, Courtesy of Zachary-CopferUp close, the crimson spots look like the ink-dots of a comic strip—precisely spaced bubbles in the bright areas that let a tawny background peek through—while a wash of red fills the shadows. But take in the blend of light and dark sections on the entire notebook-paper-size petri dish and the famous photo of Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue comes into focus. It’s one of the first “bacteriographs” Zachary Copfer, a microbiologist-turned-artist, created with his patent-pending method of developing living art with help from bacterial colonies.
“I love that picture. I love that it’s having fun with science,” says Copfer of the iconic Einstein image. “Everyone smiles when they see it.”
The former microbiologist took a job in a quality-assurance lab after studying biology at Northern Kentucky University but switched careers when the daily grind of industrial science stifled his scientific curiosity. Enrolling in the University of Cincinnati’s masters of fine arts (MFA) program in 2010, Copfer thought he would reignite his spirit by focusing on one of his hobbies—photography.
“He started out by being a straight photographer, mostly architectural [photographs], which were technically brilliant, but relatively dispassionate,” says photography professor Jane Alden Stevens, fine arts program coordinator at Cincinnati. It was when he realized he could integrate his two interests, ...
